Monday, November 09, 2015

“Sometime in 1965 my mother paid one of her ritual teatime visits,” it was just after Elizabeth’s phenomenal success as writing about Queen Victoria, when mother was nearly sixty. Elizabeth was thinking about following up her success with a book about Mary Queen of Scots.
Antonia told her mother, “You can’t do that, you’re far too moral.” Antonia knew that it was a judgement her mother would not contradict.
This was the opening for her to begin a serious study of the woman who had haunted her from childhood. She considered Mary Queen of Scots ‘her’ Mary. “Like the few important decisions in my life, it was immediate, thrilling and irreversible,” she wrote. “I will do it, I said.”
And she did, noting that she was tempted to conclude by using the immortal words of Charlotte Brontë at the end of “Jane Eyre” for “Mary Queen of Scots”: “Reader, I wrote it.” (Michael D. Langan)

And this is how Bendigo Advertiser begins a review of the latest screen adaptation of Macbeth.

When Orsen [sic] Welles made the first filmed version of Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, he envisaged a violent blend of Wuthering Heights and Bride of Frankenstein. (Pam Townsend)